“The politicians don’t just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless. When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.”
–James Dale Davison

“The mounting burden of taxation not only undermines individual incentives to increased work and earnings, but in a score of ways discourages capital accumulation and distorts, unbalances, and shrinks production. Total real wealth and income is made smaller than it would otherwise be. On net balance there is more poverty rather than less.”–Henry Hazlitt

“…every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive.”
–Auberon Herbert

“Once Confucius was walking on the mountains and he came across a woman weeping by a grave. He asked the woman what here sorrow was, and she replied, “We are a family of hunters. My father was eaten by a tiger. My husband was bitten by a tiger and died. And now my only son!” “Why don’t you move down and live in the valley? Why do you continue to live up here?” asked Confucius. And the woman replied, “But sir, there are no tax collectors here!” Confucius added to his disciples, “You see, a bad government is more to be feared than tigers.”
–Lin Yutang

“Governments last as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.”
–Bernard Berenson

“Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.”
–H.L. Mencken

“Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.”
–Edward Abbey

“Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.”
–Mark Skousen

“It is easy to be conspicuously ‘compassionate’ if others are being forced to pay the cost.”
–Murray N. Rothbard

“If we assume that the individual has an indisputable right to life, we must concede that he has a similar right to the enjoyment of the products of his labor. This we call a property right. The absolute right to property follows from the original right to life because one without the other is meaningless; the means to life must be identified with life itself. If the state has a prior right to the products of one’s labor, his right to existence is qualified . . . no such prior rights can be established, except by declaring the state the author of all rights. . . . We object to the taking of our property by organized society just as we do when a single unit of society commits the act. In the latter case we unhesitatingly call the act robbery, a malum in se. It is not the law which in the first instance defines robbery, it is an ethical principle, and this the law may violate but not supersede. If by the necessity of living we acquiesce to the force of law, if by long custom we lose sight of the immorality, has the principle been obliterated? Robbery is robbery, and no amount of words can make it anything else.”
–Frank Chodorov